Long day’s journey, cont’d

Byron York reports that President Obama will return his attention to unemployment in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday. I can’t wait. He seems to have wandered far from the subject over the last four years, but it’s probably for the best. His ideas for reducing unemployment — best represented in the trillion-dollar stimulus bill of 2009 — retard the kind of economic growth that fosters the creation of jobs by businesses in the private sector.

Byron points out that unemployment escaped Obama’s attention right through his inaugural address last month. One subject that did not escape his attention in the inaugural address came in a sentence I noted but struggled to interpret: “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”

Now here’s a clue to reading Obama. Whenever he mentions a “journey” that we are on, slow down for a close inspection. Check your pockets. Batten down the hatches. He’s coming after us to go somewhere we don’t want to go in order to reach a destination we would really be better off avoiding.

I know I waited a little long in line to vote on election day. I felt good doing so, but I know it’s not my cause that Obama is championing. What was Obama talking about? I thought he must be setting us up for expedited and enhanced amplification of the Democratic vote through Internet voting or some such scheme, and I wasn’t too far off.

Obama was in fact previewing his promotion of the so-called Voter Empowerment Act of 2013. Truth in packaging would label it the Democratic Empowerment Act. In the Wall Street Journal’s weekend interview column, James Taranto meets up with Hans Von Spakovsky to get a look at what is barreling down the pike:

Several liberal Democrats have already introduced a bill styled the Voter Empowerment Act of 2013.

The effort is a cynical partisan undertaking, according to election lawyer Hans von Spakovsky. In December, some “three dozen of the most powerful liberal advocacy groups, including union organizations,” held a strategy session, he says, citing a report from the liberal magazine Mother Jones. They agreed to “oppose all voter integrity efforts, things like voter ID,” to push for federal legislation requiring states to permit voter registration on Election Day, and to institute “automatic” voter registration.

“They basically want to use the government to do Democratic voter outreach and voter registration for them,” Mr. von Spakovsky says. “They believe that if they can get, for example, everyone registered to vote who is currently getting government benefits like welfare . . . then that will somehow get them more votes at the polls and make it easier to win elections.”

The Voter Empowerment Act would also mandate automatic registration of individuals on motor-vehicle, tax and university rolls, many of whom are aliens or have multiple addresses in different states: “You’re basically going to be registering lots of people who are ineligible and leading to many duplicate registrations.” The groups pushing such efforts—among them the Brennan Center for Justice [linked for the text of the draft of the law above], the ACLU and the NAACP—include “the same organizations that have been filing lawsuits over the past few years trying to prevent states from verifying the accuracy and eligibility of people on their voter-registration databases,” Mr. von Spakovsky says.

It’s a perfect adjunct to the immigration reform that Obama will undoubtedly also be touting on Tuesday night. Can anyone here put the pieces together?